For the last several months we've been using Cologne Blue on the Esperanto Wikipedia and just now I realized that our search results have incredibly dropped in google to the point of non-existent. I used to be able to type "Rusio", "Indonezio" or "Usono" and the Esperanto Wikipedia would be in the top ten. Could we change our software back to the old standard, because we're trying to build an encyclopedia and not win a web design contest.

I think the problem might be something different. One or two days ago, it was found that there was an error in the robots.txt, causing Google not to bookmark most Wikipedia pages. This has now been changed back, but Google has only indexed part of Wikipedia yet since then (for example, of the English Wikipedia only about 23,000 pages). It may well be that this is the reason Wikipedia pages are scoring lower than they used to do.

Talking about Google: It seems that at the moment Google has indexed ONLY the titles of the Wikipedia pages, not their contents! Is there still something wrong with the robots.txt file, or is this a quirk in the way Google is building its database?

(sending a Cc: to wikitech-l)

Andre Engels